JHipster: A Spring / AngularJS App Generator

You’re a boring, hoary Java developer but secretly always wanted to belong to that hip JavaScript-Single-Page-Application crowd? Well, with JHipster now you can!

On a more serious note, JHipster is a Yeoman generator that lets you bootstrap integrated Java (for the back-end server stuff) / AngularJS (for everything front-end and UI) web apps. JHipster makes use of proven technologies such as:

Grunt

Bower

AngularJS

Maven

Spring Boot

Spring Web MVC

The project’s goal is to provide the means for easily creating a beautiful state-of-the-art HTML5 / CSS3 / JavaScript front-end and a robust, high quality back-end and the tooling required to productively work with this stack.

Having used JHipster in a recent project I can say that it achieves this goal nicely. Creating an app is a piece of cake. JHipster pursues a ‘batteries included’ approach: A wizard process guides you through various optional features such as authentication and authorization. Once done, everything is already wired up correctly so you don’t have to deal with the gory details of how to implement a secure login process with an SPA front-end and the back-end that supplies the actual user data. Getting everything with CORS, CSRF, X-Auth-Token etc. working correctly and securely right from the start is no simple task and it’s easy to make blunders that potentially expose sensitive user data. Therefore it’s good to have that taken care of.